Aides

This is a guide to those who are going to hire a good aide with good abilities.

Aides are your companions on high sea. They assist you on your voyages and thus are very important. People choose aides on various grounds. If you value appearance above abilities, this guide may not help you much :). But if you are seeking to recruit with good starting traits, this guide may give you some help.

Stage 1. Deciding Who to Hire
Each aide is unique as each will have his or her own set of skills. Aide’s skills are divided into 3 types: support skills (gives a +1 to the rank of one of your skills), aide skills (skills on aides only, not acquirable by player) and languages. Some skills are more important and you should consider hiring an aide with them.

For the skill set of every aide, please visit the following UWO Database link to check:
Link

Below are some recommended skills for aides.

Adventure Aides
Most important skills: unlock, appraisal skills (i.e. the various subjects, not the appraisal skill for jewelry), and languages.

Unlock + 1 – unlock skill is crucial for doing various high-level adventure quests, including those which gives you rare items and equipments. However, it is not easy to grind. Appraisal skills can be trained by reading books in the archive and doing quests but unlock skills can only be trained through the latter way. Also, completing quests generally gives you a higher amount of experience points to appraisal skills than to unlock. Worse still, items that augment unlock skill is quite limited while those augmenting appraisal skills Therefore, if you want an adventure aide to help you through adventure quests, you should first seek one that augment your unlock skill.

Appraisal skills + 1 – here we mean the various subjects instead of the particular appraisal skill for jewelry. Appraisal skills are usually the most demanding skills in a particular adventure quest. For example, the quest “Lion hearted” needs Search R5, Appraisal for Jewelry R7, Unlock R5. “ For an adventure aide, it is desirable that more appraisal skills can be covered so that the aide can help more of your quests in different subjects. No single aide can augment all subjects (Geography, Archeology, Religion, Appraisal(for Jewelry), Biology, Art) but some aides can augment up to 5 of them. You should check them out.

Languages – Languages are useful for both adventuring and trading. As an adventurer, you probably need to do quests requiring you to contact people in different cities. As a trader you also need languages to travel across cultures to trade exotic goods. What if you don’t have the languages? You may use body languages or translation notes/dictionaries. However, you CANNOT use body languages to lookup records in archives. You may use translation notes/dictionaries to lookup records in archives, but they are not easily bought in large amounts. An aide with a various languages, you can save lots of inventory spaces for translation items and prevent troubles of sudden lack of them.

Trading Aides
Most important skills: production skills, trading skills.

Production skills + 1 – they are sewing, cooking, storage, casting, handicraft, alchemy (shipbuilding is special and is excluded here). For a merchant who does production, this is probably more important than trading skills, because production skills ranks are about whether you CAN/CANNOT use a particular recipe to produce something, but trading skills are only about the maximum amount of goods you can buy in a single purchase or the amount of rewards you get from nanban trades. If you are 1 rank less than required in a recipe, you cannot use it, but if you are 1 rank less in buying a type of goods, you buy a few less goods and can sail to another port/go out to far sea and returns to buy again. Most of the advanced items, equipments or ship parts need exceptionally high ranks of production skills and some of these recipes need >R15, meaning that you must rely on aides/equipments/university skills. In these situations, augmenting production skills by aides is very desirable, if not a must.

Trading skills + 1 – they are arguably less important that production skills. If you simply do not produce but only trade, you can forget about production skills and aim for an aide with your desired trading skills. Trading skills are important to any trader as they dictates your maximum amount of goods buyable from a single purchase (saving your purchase orders/your time to stock a certain amount of goods) and can help increase the amount of rewards of nanban trades.

Battle Aides
“More” important skills: Defence of shots, Evasion, enhanced shots, seize cargo, obstruction and shipbuilding.
* It is quite difficult to say what battle skills are the most important for a battle aide because they are very much dependent on the playing style of a particular user. A user favoring melee will surely prefer melee skills and plundering skills than bombardment skills. Here the guide only states some more sought-after skills generally.

Defence of shots, Evasion + 1 – they are very important in facing enemies with strong firepower, like Epic Sea Feuds. They make a difference life and death.
Enhanced shots:they are important when you need heavy firepower.
Seize cargo – It helps triggering plunder skills, and as plunder skill is very hard to grind, they are very important for grinding plunder. It is also important for, well, pirates.
Obstruction – during melee, enemies’ items will fail by chance. Useful in melee battles as opponents cannot use retreat bells to escape easily.
Shipbuilding+1 – if you grind shipbuilding, this is nearly a must because it’s very hard to grind. Hire an aide with shipbuilding +1 to lessen you pain.

Stage 2: Recruitment of Aides

After deciding which aide to recruit, you should go on to hire him/her. Aides are not recruited everywhere, each aide can be recruited only at taverns/rest houses of some particular cities, so you should go to the right city. Check the place to hire your target aide here in the following link:
Link

Then go to the city's tavern/rest house and talk with the master there and select "Employ Aide" and choose one of the available aides there.